Community I/O Community Group

This group will focus on applying current information technologies to create a foundation of infrastructure for organizing the flow of resources and support with services within human community.
All peers (individuals or projects) can state their needs (input) and offers (output).
Using Semantic Web, Federated Social Web and other related technologies people can develop various approaches of connecting those needs and offers. Including variants with and without use of currencies.

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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Zero Exchange is a kind of social network that enables people to achieve their goals through a mutually beneficial cooperation. Unlike similar systems (timebanks, local currencies), ZE is an attempt of an integrated approach to the interaction of people with the help of abstraction “collective project”, which allows to build the collaboration structures online.

At the moment system is in the development stage. Any contributions are appreciated.

Here is a preliminary prototype (v.0.16) for trading value that I offer on the premise that someone could help code it, preferably in 3-d with Vpython. I can inform the algorithms for visualizing the gravity model for the nodes (which will be pretty f’ng cool), but the paper version is pretty workable as long as the node/board-area ratio stays fairly low.

This is all I will post for now, sorry if it’s vague. Feel free to ask questions.

I’m going to try to cut and paste here, but if the formatting isn’t good see pangaia.sf.net|prototype.

A game consists of a set of Rules played over time. This is a Physics-type game of sorts, You will be exchanging “mass” and “energy”. Like the Cosmos itself, this Game is an Infinite Game (unbounded) and you are the c2 in the middle.

Anyone can play and everyone starts equal. The Rules of the Game will become more apparent as you play.

A tack-board serves as The Apeiron*, but we’ll simply call it: the Board.

The Objective of the Game is to maximize value-creation through crowd-sourced collaboration and exchange. You have both this Board and the [physical space for collaborating/exhibiting together] to achieve it.

On the Board one can place People and Ideas. These form the primary Items of the Game.

The act of creating a Person-Item for yourself and posting it to the Board makes you a Player. See Initialization.

Treat the Board as a blank slate. Orientation on the Board is not necessarily meant to confer a particular axis or ordering. See Grouping.

Items can accumulate Votes. These can be up or down. For the Voter, these actions count as Work, you are advised to tally a count for yourself with each vote and conceal it behind your Name-piece. See Scoring.

Claimed Items are LIVE and represented by Circles — they can Vote; Unclaimed (or inanimate) Items by Rectangles and are not able to vote. (NotYetImplemented) See Symbols.

You can also add your Reputation to a Vote (+/-1), these put a charge on the Item (equivalent in force to your Vote-tally behind your Name) and form attraction/repulsion networks. Place the Item near your Name-piece for positive Vote and away from for negative.

Quests: A Quest is something that takes you outside the Game Board. This game generates real currencythrough the reciprocation of offers/wishes. It works like this: if you place an Offer such as “Plant a tree in the empty lot on Agua Fria: 10 credits”, give 10 credits to the Player who completes the Quest, but take no corresponding debit. You have just generated value.

In addition to Quests there is Trade. A trade is a conversion from the physical world of objects into or out of the Pangaia network. You can place an item, for example: “couch: 100 credits”. You receive the physical couch and give 100 credits to the other Player.

Keep in mind that the credibilityof your offer is directly connected to your Reputation; i.e., your ability to play by the Rules and within the Spirit of the Game. “Gaming the system” eventually creates conflict, eliminates your credibility while adversely affecting the stability of the whole system: don’t succumb. It is advised to only offer or request as much as you have earned in your Score – this ensures that your risk is proportional to your experience or “state of play”.

As a final hint: It’s an Infinite Game: think Eternally.

….otherwise Welcome to the Game! Eventually, you will see that it will make a Tree of Life. :^)

=== Initialization ===

To seed this process, this Game starts with these Primordial forces:

The simple act of posting an Item earns 1 credit — this includes the posting of your own Player/Name item.

Removing an item also earns 1 credit — IFF it was there long enough to have been observed and Interacted with by another Player. (Paper-version only)

Items removed from the board should be placed in History. Thiscould be behind other pieces or in a separate file accessible by all.

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*That’s the first clue, by the way, but don’t expect us to shout them like this one.

As human community, part of Earth’s ecosystem, we all participate in flow or resources and services. In this flow we have our wishes and offers, which I compare to inputs and outputs. We have them both as individuals as well as organizations, which I see as collectives of individuals.

In such network of peers, we match our wishes and offers creating flows. We can approach organizing such flow in many different ways. Nowadays it looks like majority of people tend to organize this flow around certain child of our collective imagination – money. Current information and communication technologies give us an opportunity of crating great diversity of systems. Having various coexisting alternatives, including variants with and without currencies, everyone can choose according to one’s own preference in which to participate an in which not.

To have foundation for developing such diversity of complementary systems, I see very practical to have common way of describing our wishes and offers. As well as dependencies among them – offer X depends on wish Y. We can use web technologies to help us with matching wishes and offers, visualize their interdependencies and predict how our contributions propagate and support desired outcomes.

To name just few general directions, systems developed by people can take:

various currency variants

timebanks

direct and indirect barter

commons and peer-production

reputation systems

gift culture

I would like to start inviting to our group people working with various existing sharing networks. Together we can work with real world cases which could than take advantage of standards we develop.